MAINSTAY - First Friday with Joe Holt - with Allyn Johnson
Our resident impresario, pianist Joe Holt’s first show in his 2023 “First Friday” series (presented on the First Friday of every month) features jazz pianist Allyn Johnson in a program Joe has titled simply “Two Pianos”.
Washington D.C. area music critics hail Johnson’s performances as “setting a standard for other performers to shoot for.”
A native of D.C., Johnson began playing the piano at the age of five and honed his technical facilities as the pianist in his uncle’s church. “I believe that my improvisational intuition probably developed from playing in that church,” Johnson has stated. He credits what Church musicians call this fluency ‘flowing in the Spirit.’
While Johnson received considerable local recognition early on, he never moved away in pursuit of the world stage. Instead, Johnson now stands as one of the most influential figures in the D.C. jazz scene, where he is known as both a performer who can consistently draw capacity crowds to venues, and an educator (he is the director of Jazz Studies at the University of the District of Columbia).